George Floyd & The Enduring Disregard For Black Humanity

George Floyd & The Enduring Disregard For Black Humanity

Three weeks before the three-year anniversary of George Floyd’s brutal murder, Jordan Neely was executed in the same way; a chokehold delivered by a white man who viewed him as a threat instead of a human being. For three weeks, we’ve had to watch our timelines debate whether Jordan Neely was worthy of compassion, of care, and of his life. And for three years, we’ve seen George Floyd go from a man to a martyr for racial reckoning. But Floyd didn’t sacrifice his life for the greater good. He wasn’t an activist or a symbol upon which to project supposed progress. He was a person. A son. A brother. A father.


In the three years since George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, his death has been used as a prop for political gain — on the right to justify their tirade against “wokeness” and fairness and the fact that anti-Black racism exists, and on the left to sign into order police-reform legislation that wouldn’t have saved Floyd’s life. Floyd is now fading into the background of our post-2020 timelines. Like mandatory masks and the cast of Tiger King, the public remembrance of Floyd is slowly being relegated to A Thing We Cared About In 2020. On the third anniversary of his murder, I imagine that there will be a few tributes, some nods to the fact that his brutal murder catapulted the country into a long overdue conversation about the white supremacy embedded into its fabric, but generally, (white) people seem to want to go back to a time when Black life lost was an inconvenience they could ignore, not a systemic plight rightly inciting riots and calls for change. Jordan Neely is just the latest – and most public – example.

Chauvin and Penny have become white knights, saviors of civility, while Both Floyd and Neely were stripped of their humanity to become hashtags.

Neely was an unhoused Black man on a New York City subway pleading for someone to see him. His actual calls were for food and water — basic human necessities — but at their core, his cries were simply a plea for help. According to accounts, Neely was yelling and in distress. He wasn’t harming anyone. And yet, a white former marine named Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold for 15 minutes (according to one onlooker), effectively killing him. Penny has expressed no remorse for his actions and, like Chauvin before him, has received an outpouring of support and defense from strangers. These people have been able to find empathy for men capable of so callously killing another, but not for their victims.

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